African American Studies category: 2787 books
by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Language: English
Release Date: July 6, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: July 6, 2011
In a coming-of-age story as enchantingly vivid and ribald as anything Mark Twain or Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., recounts his childhood in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, in the 1950s and 1960s and ushers readers into a gossip, of lye-and-mashed-potato “processes,” and...
The Trials of Phillis Wheatley
America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers
Language: English
Release Date: April 29, 2009
In 1773, the slave Phillis Wheatley literally wrote her way to freedom. The first person of African descent to publish a book of poems in English, she was emancipated by her owners in recognition of her literary achievement. For a time, Wheatley was the most famous black woman in the West. But Thomas...
Remembering Slavery
African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation
Language: English
Release Date: July 26, 2011
"A Best Book of the Year" —Library Journal and Booklist
Using excerpts from the thousands of interviews conducted with ex-slaves in the 1930s by researchers working with the Federal Writer's Project, this astonishing collection makes available in print the only known recordings...
by
Language: English
Release Date: October 14, 2004
Language: English
Release Date: October 14, 2004
From the music of Louis Armstrong to the portraits by Beauford Delaney, the writings of Langston Hughes to the debut of the musical Show Boat, the Harlem Renaissance is one of the most significant developments in African-American history in the twentieth century. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance,...
Going Too Far
Essays about America's Nervous Breakdown
Language: English
Release Date: September 1, 2012
Ishmael Reed goes too far, again! Just as the fugitive slaves went to Canada and challenged the prevailing view that slaves were well off under their masters, Ishmael Reed has gone all the way to Quebec—where this book is published—to challenge the widespread opinion that racism is no longer a...
Rough Amusements
The True Story of A'Lelia Walker, Patroness of the Harlem Renaissance's Down-Low Culture
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2008
When A'Lelia Walker died in 1931 after a midnight snack of lobster and chocolate cake washed down with champagne, it marked the end of one of the most striking social careers in New York's history. The daughter of rags-to-riches multi-millionaire Madame C.J. Walker (the washerwoman who marketed the...
by Captain Theodore Canot
Language: English
Release Date: November 9, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: November 9, 2012
Grim account by a former slave ship captain describes the apalling machinery of the commercial slave trade, including the harems and "factories" maintained by slavers, treatment and discipline of black Africans on slave ships, the suppression of slave revolts at sea, and much more. Republication of the classic 1854 edition.
Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion
Including the 1831 "Confessions"
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2012
In the summer of 1831, a band of some forty slaves led by Nat Turner attacked slave-owning residents of Southampton County, Virginia. One of the largest and most violent revolts in the history of the young nation, the rebellion took the lives of some sixty white men, women, and children. An outcry...
Lift Up Thy Voice
The Sarah and Angelina Grimké Family's Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders
Language: English
Release Date: December 31, 2002
In the late 1820s Sarah and Angelina Grimké traded their elite position as daughters of a prominent white slaveholding family in Charleston, South Carolina, for a life dedicated to abolitionism and advocacy of women's rights in the North. After the Civil War, discovering that their late brother had...
Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence
1818-1913
Language: English
Release Date: June 18, 2013
51 speeches by prominent African-American leaders include Booker T. Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" address, Frederick Douglass' "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", plus speeches by W. E. B. Du Bois, Fanny Jackson, Rev. W. J. Gaines, and many others.
by Charles J. Elmore Ph.D.
Language: English
Release Date: February 19, 2002
Language: English
Release Date: February 19, 2002
Pioneering African-American families, spanning generations from slavery to freedom, enrich Savannah's collective history. Men and women such as Andrew Bryan, founder of the nation's oldest continuous black Baptist church; the Rev. Ralph Mark Gilbert, who revitalized the NAACP in Savannah; and Rebecca...
by Ida B. Wells
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: June 30, 2015
A shocking and powerful account of lynching written by activist, journalist, and former slave Ida B. Wells
In the postbellum American South, lynching was a frightfully common occurrence, perpetrated so frequently that most Southern politicians and leaders turned a blind eye to the practice....
First Class
The Legacy of Dunbar, Americas First Black Public High School
Language: English
Release Date: August 1, 2013
Combining a fascinating history of the first U.S. high school for African Americans with an unflinching analysis of urban public-school education today, First Class explores an underrepresented and largely unknown aspect of black history while opening a discussion on what it takes to make a public...
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Social Essays
Language: English
Release Date: January 1, 2009
Essays of the 1960s by a prominent African American voice who “demands rights—not conditional favors” (The New York Times Book Review).
Amiri Baraka, also known as LeRoi Jones, was known not only as a poet, playwright, and founder of the Black Arts movement, but also as one of the most provocative...